Reuben Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Reuben Faulkner spent his working life with a river under him, and the Merrimack was, by his own account, a better teacher than any minister. Born in 1739 at Haverhill, Massachusetts, he was a boatman for most of his forty-five years, poling and sailing gundalows laden with hay, timber, brick and barrelled fish between the upcountry landings and the mouth of the river at Newburyport. He was not a slayer, and the Red Ledger of the Faulkners never entered a single kill against his name. But his sister Lucy was one of the most respected hunters of her generation, and Reuben was the man who carried her, her gear and her quarry across the water when no road would do. Haverhill was a compact river town in the northeast corner of the province, a place of shipwrights, tanners, shoemakers and farmers, with a landing below the falls where the tide gave out and the cargo changed hands. The town sat on the great bend of the Merrimack, and everything from cordwood to cider passed along the water on its way to the sea. Meetinghouse bells and river fog were the two fixed features of the day. In spring the freshet tore at the banks and filled the meadows, and in winter the ice made the river a road that a man could cross on a sledge or be drowned trying to. A boy raised there learned early to read the colour of the water, the set of the wind and the temper of the men who worked it. His father, Gideon Mather Faulkner, born in 1713, was a farmer who worked forty acres of intervale and upland above the town. He was a solid, unsentimental man who did not hunt and did not pretend to understand the family's business, though he knew of it and never stood in its way. His mother, Patience Hale, born in 1707, was a milliner who made caps, hoods and ribbons for the Haverhill women and kept a small shop window in the front room. She died in 1749, when Reuben was ten. The household then rested on Gideon and on Reuben's sister Lucy Hale Faulkner, born in 1738, who was scarcely eleven herself and who grew up fast in consequence. Gideon outlived his son, dying in 1785 at seventy-two, and the neighbours remembered him at the churchyard for the second time in as many years, older and stiffer than his age. Reuben was not an easy boy to keep on a farm. He liked the landing better than the furrow, and by his early teens he was hanging about the wharves and running errands for the gundalow men. A carrier named in the parish records only as a Merrimack boatman took him on to pole and tend, and by twenty he was working his own boat, a flat-bottomed, lateen-rigged craft with a shallow draft and a high, curved prow. The work was hard and exact. He knew the shoals off Deer Island, the ledges at the falls, the places where the channel shifted after every spring flood, and the taverns at each landing where a boatman could dry his stockings and hear the news. Men who hired him said he was steady, thrifty and slow to anger, and that he was the only boatman on the river who never lost a cargo of glass. The wars with France on the frontier touched him early. Massachusetts raised men for the campaigns to the north and west, and boatmen were in demand for moving stores up the rivers and along the coast. Reuben served short spells, carrying provisions and bateaux work rather than a musket, and came home each time with more silver and fewer words. He did not talk much about what he had seen. What he did tell his sister, according to a note in her hand, was that the river towns had begun to lose people in ways that did not square with fever or Indian raids, and that a boatman heard things. That was where his usefulness to the family lay. Lucy Hale Faulkner was called to the work in her youth and became a vampire slayer whose hunts ranged along the Merrimack and the coast, and she needed a way to move quickly, quietly and by night. Reuben supplied it. He ferried her to islands and marsh farms where no wagon could go, waited at a landing with the tide running and the boat ready, and took her off again before daylight. The Red Ledger has no name for him. Lucy's entries occasionally record that the river brought her in, and in the margins of one she added, in her own hand, that her brother had put her ashore at the right place and the right hour and had asked nothing. He was proud of that arrangement and never boasted of it. He never married and had no children, and the ledger is brief on the point. The boatman's life is a poor one for courtship: the months of spring and autumn belonged to the river, and the winter months to mending, and a man who came home smelling of tar and bilge rarely found a wife waiting. Reuben lived in a rented room near the landing and dined, when he could, at his sister's table or his father's. He was known as a good uncle to the children of the parish, showing them knots and letting them steer, and it was said in Haverhill that no child had ever been lost while he was on the water. His place in the rivalry with the Proctors was slight, but it was there. The White Ledger's men in Pennsylvania and the Virginia valley kept a running tally against the Faulkners, and they liked to point out that a hunter needs to reach her quarry. Reuben would have replied, if asked, that the Faulkners reached theirs by water, and that a ledger with the Guest of Towton still on its books, from the days of the Wars of the Roses in 1461, had no business lecturing the men who took their tally at first hand. It was a boatman's argument and a good one. He fell ill with a fever in the late summer of 1784, on a run down the river with a cargo of lumber, and was put ashore at Newburyport and then carried home. The physicians of the town did what they could, which in that period was bleeding, bark and prayer, and he died within the fortnight, aged forty-five. His father Gideon buried him and followed a year later. Lucy took over his boat, sold it to a Merrimack man and kept its tiller. The Slayerverse tradition remembers Reuben Faulkner as the unnamed hand behind many of a great hunter's nights, the one member of the household who never claimed a kill and never lost a passenger.